Published 4:00 am, Thursday, September 24, 1998

1998-09-24 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- The 49ers are used to performing last-minute miracles, but how many times can they call the old Lazarus play to bring their stadium plan back from the dead?

Resurrection is becoming a common theme for the team these days, whether it's inducing dead people to vote or getting public officials to reverse predictions of an untimely stadium demise.

Indeed, not since the Gold Rush cheerleaders unveiled their new go-go boots this month have there been so many spins, feints and splits at Candlestick Park.

In case you were enjoying a bye week, key figures behind the troubled stadium project now say the plan to build a new football complex is back on track, though there are no guarantees that it will ever be built.

Latest news videos

At first I was confused. Could this be the stop-and-go move or the up and out? Then I remembered that the last time the stadium doomsayers spoke out, His Most High Regency told us that the 2003 Super Bowl will be held in San Francisco, whether it's in the city or not.

It's hard to deny the beauty in that line of thinking, whether you understand it or not.

"Will tomorrow happen? I hope to hell it does," Willie Brown said after meeting with 49ers officials and NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue last week. "But I'm not guaranteeing it."

This immediately tells us two things: The stadium deal has now officially been listed as a "pick 'em" in the betting line, and the mayor is mindful of what happened in his last guaranteed victory -- Muni.

However, at least the engineering wizards at Muni can tell us why the trains aren't running. The city can't even seem to find out why the estimated stadium costs keep rising faster than a Viagra junkie.

In what was probably the most honest statement to come from the stadium summit last week, Brown called the discussions in the closed- door "painful." For an emperor who has been known to fiddle while his kingdom burns, this is what we in the journalism community often refer to as unexpected candor.

The pain apparently stemmed from 49ers President Larry Thrailkill's estimate that the cost of the stadium has risen in a year from $325 million to at least $500 million. While San Francisco's labor costs have been known to be extravagant, even a union die-hard might have a problem explaining that one.

Brown said part of the problem stemmed from the team's inclusion in the estimate of such items as building new roads and preparing the site for the adjoining mall and entertainment complex where the phantom voters were expected to shop.

The mayor said those items should be considered separately, but then added that he hoped that the state would be be paying for new roads -- this based on his good buddy Gray Davis becoming California's second Democratic governor in about 200 years.

Yet Davis' chances appear to be better than the stadium's at this point, since it looks like the 49ers aren't willing to cover the added costs and the city's share has been limited by voters to $100 million. But rather than explain exactly why the 49ers believe the stadium will now cost $500 million, Thrailkill said that the 49ers are committed to building a stadium for $325 million.

This is one of the reasons I never went into accounting, since I seemed to always lose track of $175 million here, a few hundred million there. My guess is that Thrailkill meant that the 49ers would still build a state-of-the-art facility -- but they'd just cut costs by installing wooden benches, maybe even winning over the old faithful by importing them from Kezar Stadium.

(NFL chief Tagliabue, by the way, criticized reporters for questioning the numbers and flagged them for press interference, giving the ball back to the 49ers.)

So now the game summary looks something like this: For several months, the 49ers have been warning that the stadium will cost millions more than anyone expected. The team's ownership is in question, because one DeBartolo family member doesn't care about football and the other could be indicted on criminal charges. And the team's management recently suffered a severe shakeup, with former 49ers President Carmen Policy bolting to Cleveland -- Cleveland -- to run an expansion franchise.

Oh, and the only sure thing at this point is that the mall's developers insist that they still want to construct the shops that a large portion of San Francisco voters said they didn't want in the first place.

Sounds like it's time to put in the fishes and loaves option, or maybe see if His Royal Municipality can part the floodwaters in Candlestick's parking lot this winter.

Sometimes you just have to believe, whether it makes sense to or not.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.